


Sacrament

by tolstayas



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: Bisexual Character, F/M, Nonbinary Character, Other, Period-Typical Homophobia, and in my canon fabien and claudine are two kinsey 5s making it work, and so on - Freeform, its my canon i make the rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22465039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: Domestic scene, set a little while before the unimaginable. Claudine talks and Fabien listens. Perhaps - as someone would write, three centuries later - one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
Relationships: Claudine Masson/Fabien Marchal
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Sacrament

She was sitting on the table, cross-legged, with her dress undone, pulling a brush through her hair when he walked in. 

He stood still, as he often did, looking at her, taking in the warmth everyone couldn't help but feel around her, the radiation of her strength, her tenderness. 

She didn't need to turn her head to know he was there. She wasn't sure how she felt about it - about  _ being looked at _ . Sometimes it scared her - to know that she could be reduced to a reflection of herself on someone's retina, scrutinized. A specimen under a magnifying glass. She would shudder. She preferred to be the one looking through the glass, analyzing. She preferred to be listened to than looked at. 

But when he looked at her - the way he looked at her… She became somehow more materially herself, her soul tangible for a moment. It made her feel like herself in the same way wearing a uniform makes you feel like a soldier. She didn't become herself in his eyes; she was a whole unto herself; but in his gaze she was - finally - recognized. Acknowledged. Even, she hoped, understood. 

“I have a confession to make,” she said, finally, still facing away from him.

“I am the furthest thing from a priest.”

“I don't want a priest.”

_ There are things I thought I could never tell you.  _

She turned and faced him; he stepped forward, took her hands in his, almost on instinct. She let him do it - hesitantly, but gratefully. Grateful for something to hold onto. Grateful that her man was a gentle one, when he needed to be. 

_ That is what I thought.  _

She paused, and thought about her small hands held in the large, toughened hands of a powerful man who loved her. She thought that she could always just kiss him, if she couldn't get the words out, and he would forget about it soon enough. 

_ But now I am telling you.  _

Of course, she would never forgive herself for that. She was many things, but she had never been a coward. 

Claudine opened her mouth, and breathed in slowly, and spoke. 

"There are things I thought I could never tell you," she said. "That is what I thought. But now I am telling you." Another breath. She looked up at him; his eyes were soft. She couldn't hesitate. "I want to be true - true to you, true to myself." 

He nodded, solemn and loving, and here she faltered. She faltered. Why? She had said these words to herself so many hundreds of times, or at least so many times it felt like hundreds. She had polished her confession, perfected it - not in the way a scholar would, to embellish; but as a doctor would cut out a tumour, distill a root to its essence. To strip down the words, to say only what was most genuine. 

But she faltered. She wanted to curse. 

Any burden is borne down by the explanation it requires. The longer it takes for you to understand me, the more I am alone. 

It was his kindness that stopped her short, making her doubt, making her want to stop time and keep everything exactly as it had been. But it was also his kindness that brought her out of it, as always. 

“Take all the time you need," he said, in that soft voice he rarely used. "You know all the worst sides of me, you knew them all along. You know there’s nothing worth hiding from me. Whatever it is, turn it over in your heart as many times as you need. Then tell me. I can wait." 

And he sat down in a chair which he pulled up to the table, and looked up at her with a reverence she had never been able to convince herself she deserved; and she told him.

"Once," she said, "when I was young -" 

"You're still young," he muttered, but not pedantically. 

"Very young. Perhaps thirteen or fourteen..." 

That is when the story began. At least, that is when she thinks it began; that is when it  _ should _ begin. In the logical sequence of things.

_ Once, when I was young - very young, perhaps thirteen or fourteen - I went to visit family outside Paris. It was my cousin's wedding. I hadn’t seen him for years. I didn’t even recognize him. There were not enough beds, so the youngest women - the bride-to-be and myself - took my cousin's room the night before the wedding, while the men slept in the barn.  _

_ It was an arranged marriage, of course. The bride was beautiful, young, terrified. Her name was Rose. She couldn't sleep; the two of us stayed up and talked.  _

_ She had a very soft voice, which I found fascinating, for some reason. But she kept trembling. She was really too young... I kept making jokes, I wanted her to stop shaking, I wanted to hear her laugh. We played silly games. At some point - I don't know if it was a dare, or just some stupid thing - we dug out all my cousin's clothes from the shelves. I made a dirty joke about the size of his breeches, and she stopped laughing and went all pale, and I wanted her to laugh again, I would do anything to make her laugh...  _

_ But all these are just excuses...  _

_ I started putting on my cousin's clothes, and she started laughing; so I went on, I overdid it, I showed myself off like a court lady shows off the newest fashions she has bought... Just peasant's breeches and tunics, you know... And once we had started laughing again we didn't stop, muffling our faces in the pillows to keep from waking the rest of the house.  _

_ When our sides hurt from holding in laughter we lay on our backs on my cousin's little straw mattress and whispered things. Everything only brought us back to the marriage. We couldn't help it. It was the only thing on both our minds.  _

_ Rose said she was glad her husband was young, and hardworking, and didn't drink. I said she didn't seem glad... I should have been kinder to her, really, but I knew my turn would come, most likely sooner rather than later, and I was afraid too, I wanted her to comfort me. She didn't reply. I asked if she loved him. She didn't reply. I asked if she had kissed him.  _

_ "Of course," she said.  _

_ "What does it feel like?"  _

_ There was a long pause then, I remember.  _

_ "Do you want to try?" There was a sort of double tremor in Rose's voice, as if she hadn't expected herself to stumble, and was caught off guard by her own hesitation.  _

At this point Claudine stopped talking, and realized she had closed her eyes. She opened them and looked at him, fighting the urge to beg for forgiveness, to go back to before. Before she had ruined the lie by beginning to tell the truth. 

Fabien looked up at her, and, though he was the cruelest man in the King's court, there was no anger on his face. There was still respect in his eyes. 

Still, Claudine couldn't resist the need to backpedal, now that she had almost made it to the point of no return. 

"I'm sorry," she blurted. 

Then she winced, because she had wanted to be clear, she had wanted to be decisive, and she had failed. Because she didn't want to be pathetic, she wanted to be honest. Because she knew his forgiveness could not be begged for, anyhow. 

But Fabien smiled, looking up at her; smiled, trusting her always to be everything he wasn't. Trusting her to be her. 

"Did you?" He murmured.

Claudine tilted her head in confusion. 

"Kiss her." 

Exhale. "Yes." 

" _ Et alors? _ ”

"It’s not - it’s not just that." Claudine hesitated again, looked down into Fabien's stormy eyes. "It's that - it's that I kissed another girl when I was seventeen, and I kept on kissing her until we were nineteen and her parents found us and I never saw her again. It's that what I found exciting, that night, wasn't only that she - wasn't only the kiss. It was - I mean - not the clothes, exactly. But just… not being the woman. That's what I wanted, more than anything, not to be a woman. It's that I still wear that costume, the men’s clothes I used to wear at the palace, sometimes, when my body feels so strange to me that I can't bear to look at myself. And it’s that it’s not - I’m not -" 

She had rehearsed, she had practiced, but of course, when so much was at stake, the words caught in her throat. There was a pricking behind her eyes. She couldn't cry. She didn't want to be pitied. She wanted to be understood.

She stopped, reconsidered how she wanted to make this confession. Realized her script was too well rehearsed. Something occurred to her.

"When you look at me," she asked, "is it the same way you look at other women?"

He took a moment to think. "No." 

"What does that mean?" 

"When I look at women I see their necks first, their shoulders. Their mouths. Their legs, if I can." He breathed out, almost a laugh.

Claudine smiled, too. This was not a barrier between them; she did not envy those women their place in the world or in his heart. She knew too well that it was not so enviable a place as that. 

"And when you look at me?" 

He looked, noticing for the first time how he looked, what he was looking at. "Your arms. Your jawline. Your back. Your hands. Your eyes." 

Claudine’s heart pounded. This was what she wanted to hear. She gathered the truth around her like flowers.

"If -” saying it directly would be too brutal, any truth too long unsaid called for the conditional - “if I told you I've never really felt like a woman all my life -" 

"It wouldn't surprise me, no." 

Love is the highest form of understanding. 

“You -”

“Claudine... I fell in love with you in a waistcoat and breeches, and I would have fallen just as deeply in love if you were a man wearing them. I have kissed ten times as many men as you’ve kissed girls. When I look at you it isn’t the same way I look at women,” he went on, “and it isn’t the same way I look at men. You’re something else. I know that. And in the end, who am I to judge? Who am I to ask that you pretend to be anything you aren’t?” 

Somehow this hardly surprised her. If anything, it reassured her. They would never be the couple in a romance novel; so perhaps they were free to be themselves. She pitied anyone too perfect to have that privilege. She smiled. 

If the King says you’re a man, then you are a man, the valet had said. But she knew not all the kings in Europe could make her one. Not more than all their queens could make her a woman. 

“You see right through me. I couldn’t hide if I tried.”

“My job is to see through people. That’s not what I do when I’m with you; I’ve never had to read between the lines with you. When you move, when you breathe, when you talk to me - I don’t have to decipher it. My heart and yours… we speak the same language.”

Claudine looked down at Fabien’s face, turned up to her, and she could hardly bear the look she saw there, the love she felt in his eyes. You, the look on his face said, you are who you claim to be. You are who you know you are. 

Standing up, letting her undone dress hang from its straps, Claudine bent to kiss him. 

Fabien stood too, took off his coat, slipped it over Claudine’s shoulders. Too big, of course - but it gave her an oddly dignified look. He put his arms around her, she leaned into him; for a long time they held onto each other. That is also a kind of understanding. 

It is even a little sacred.

  
  



End file.
